


From sullen earth

by belmanoir



Category: Witching Hill - E. W. Hornung
Genre: Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28792545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belmanoir/pseuds/belmanoir
Summary: It was our first morning up north. I had thought Uvo was glad to come away with me, despite a certain heaviness in his limbs as we left the old Estate; but when I came downstairs that morning and sought him out, my heart turned cold within me, to find him in the bow-window of my father’s library with his hands over his face and his shoulders shaking.Since E.W. Hornung couldn’t write (or at least, publish) the full HEA in 1913, I wanted to do it for him.
Relationships: Uvo Delavoye/Gillon
Kudos: 1





	From sullen earth

**Author's Note:**

> **cw: references to suicidal thoughts**

It was our first morning up north. I had thought Uvo was glad to come away with me, despite a certain heaviness in his limbs as we left the old Estate; but when I came downstairs that morning and sought him out, my heart turned cold within me, to find him in the bow-window of my father’s library with his hands over his face and his shoulders shaking. 

His weeping was quite silent, and if it had been anybody else I should have taken the hint and crept away again. But I thought there had been perhaps a few too many tactful silences already, between me and Uvo. So in I went, and shut the door behind me less softly than I had opened it.

Imagine my surprise and relief, when his hands came away from his face, and I saw the light in it. “Yes, that’s right, Gilly,” he said with something like a laugh. “They’re tears of joy, and don’t you suppose any different!”

“Joy that—that—” The real reason I thought of, was that he had done nothing with Mrs. Ricardo of which he need be ashamed; but _that_ was a tactful silence I had given an old soldier my solemn word never to break. “That the ghost is laid at last?” I suggested in the end, rather lamely.

He looked at me with a sudden firming of his liquid eyes, and blew his nose with decision. “Well, and I’ll tell you if you really want to know,” he declared. “Only—only I’m awfully afraid, Gilly, that it will spoil everything. And we might get on so beautifully, you know. But just now I almost don’t mind it, I’m so relieved. I feel as though I ought not to be afraid of anything, ever again.”

I did not quite dare to take his meaning, but I assured him that of course I wanted to know whatever it might be.

“Well then, it’s like this—but maybe you know all about it already? I’ve wondered if you did, and it was one of those things you thought it would be better if we didn’t talk about, like my theories on the subject of my old man of the soil, because then you’d have to disagree with me. And besides, I was horribly afraid that it was rather too _much_ the same thing, if you see what I mean.”

I didn’t, and said so.

“But you want me to say it?”

I hesitated. “Perhaps I shall be sorry after,” I said at last. “But I really don’t see how. I—I’ve been wishing you _would_ talk to me like you used to. You’ve been awfully polite this last visit, Uvo.”

He laughed. “And it isn’t like me? No, that’s all right. I know my manners aren’t always quite the thing.”

But something under the laugh made me screw up my courage, and blurt out, “And—and I was cursed jealous, to think that maybe—maybe you were talking to somebody else, instead.”

He flushed. “Then since you’re quite sure….Do you love me, Gilly?”

That was more directness than I had quite looked for, and its effect was rather like an omnibus screeching to a halt in front of you, when you’ve been daydreaming and didn’t see it coming—first you’re too startled to move, and then you’re seized with an outsize fear that it will drive off again without you, and bolt forward at double-speed. “Yes!” I said hastily, and too loud.

He peered at me from under lowered brows. “As…as Achilles loved Patroclus?”

I was surprised into a snort of laughter. “I hope not _just_ like, Uvo, but yes.”

“But perhaps you don’t take my meaning,” he persisted, rather anxiously. 

I can see him now, slim and straight and worn, with some note of ironclad self-certainty under the anxiety that made me feel it was for him to first take hold of me, and not the other way round: that I should be spoiling things myself, if I simply went at him.

“You said you were going to tell me something,” I said, trying to sound as though it _were_ only one of the old arguments. “You’ve only asked me questions, up to now.”

He got up from the window-seat. The morning light limned his dark head and put his face in shadow, but when he took my hand in both of his, those dark eyes were steady flames, with as little flicker in them as Nettleton’s church-candles. I thought of the old lord’s signet ring, all at once—not that I saw any deeper resemblance than the familial in Uvo just then, only that it seemed to me my heart was wax, and Uvo was pressing his seal firmly into it. 

“I’ve been so afraid, Gilly,” he said, but in such a voice—as though he really never would be afraid of anything again, and never mind his hands making mine tremble along with them. “I was terrified, in fact, that I’d find I didn’t love you after all when we left Witching Hill—that it was all the influence of that old sinner of mine. Every time I went into Richmond or up to town, I used to ask myself if I loved you any less, now I was off the ancestral soil. I didn’t think it made any difference, but could I be mistaken?” 

My fingers must have twitched, though I never thought of taking them away, for his grip tightened. “I’m ashamed of myself, Gilly, and you ought to be too, because I almost let him keep on haunting the place, and devil take the hindmost, all so I could go on… And that’s why I was weeping just now—because I was right all along! I was right, and you’re the purest, truest impulse my wretched soul ever had! Even if you’d answered me differently just now—even if you answer me differently in a moment—I shall always be glad. ‘Better to have loved and lost’—and I should rather have made another whom our high-minded Vicar would refuse to lay with the rest of the family bones, than to find out I never loved at all. And you really don’t mind it?”

“ _Mind_ it? Of course not! I’ve never been gladder of anything in my life. Won’t you—won’t you—?” And it was my turn to be implausibly anxious that I’d misunderstood the whole thing, and perhaps _he_ didn’t know the things people said about the old Greeks he’d named to me.

But his eyes turned sly—his own delighted slyness, all his own—and his grip on my hands both lighter, and more sure. “Won’t I what?” he asked innocently. “‘Even unto half my kingdom’, Gilly boy, but I can’t read your mind, you know.”

“Can’t you?” I retorted.

The corner of his mouth curved sweetly. I rang with that curve, as though I had been a bell and he the clapper. “Well, perhaps,” he conceded.

Next instant he was smiling too broadly to make a proper job of kissing me, and I was grinning too wide myself to be of much assistance. And the rest was not silence, but a joyful noise. 

Most of it was Uvo—shall I ever forget the happy tones of his babbling voice? But he did stop now and then, and he did manage to really kiss me; and when he did I could hear that somewhere out in the bright blue morning, a skylark was singing.


End file.
